Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on basement television.
I was born in the late ‘60s, which means that I am a child of the ‘80s. Like most of Gen-X, I came of age with movies like The Breakfast Club. That said, those of us who liked things darker with a touch of comedy had two movies that defined a large part of who we were. Those are Beetlejuice and Heathers. Both of these movies explored some dark territory (the second more than the first) and also came with a good number of laughs. While there have been some fun horror comedies since then as well as horror romances, none really feels like it has picked up the mantle of those films like Lisa Frankenstein. It’s not a coincidence that Lisa Frankenstein takes place in 1989, the year after Beetlejuice came out and the same year the Heathers did.
In 1989, unfortunately-named goth girl Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is dealing with moving in her senior year of high school, a step-mother (Carla Gugino) who is awful to her, a bubbly cheerleader step-sister named Taffy (Liza Soberano), and the fact that a couple years previously, her mother was murdered by an axe-wielding maniac. Essentially friendless and mired in an unrequited crush with the editor of the school literary magazine, Lisa spends a lot of her time like any goth in an abandoned cemetery. One of the graves, that of a young man, is her favorite, and she frequently leaves him trinkets and talks to him.
